Staff Software Engineer, Backend (growth Platform)

Affirm Affirm · Fintech · Canada, United States · Remote · Consumer Engineering

Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Growth Platform) at Affirm. This role focuses on building and owning shared backend platforms that power incentives, experimentation, personalization, and data-driven decisioning for consumer and merchant experiences. Responsibilities include setting technical strategy, collaborating with product management and analytics, defining platform abstractions and APIs, ensuring operational availability of critical systems, and fostering a culture of quality. Requires extensive experience in designing and launching scalable backend systems, distributed systems, and shared platforms for growth-critical workflows.

What you'd actually do

  1. You will be responsible for setting technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, owning backend platforms that power incentives and growth initiatives across Affirm.
  2. You will collaborate with product management, analytics, and partner teams to shape technical direction for incentive systems, ensuring long-term sustainability, correctness, and clear trade-offs that inform roadmap decisions.
  3. You will act as a force-multiplier by defining platform abstractions, APIs, and architectural patterns that enable product teams to safely launch, experiment with, and evolve incentive-based experiences.
  4. You take ownership of your team’s operations and availability by ensuring robust monitoring, alerting, playbooks, and on-call practices are in place for business-critical incentive and growth systems.
  5. You will foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting clear design and code review standards, and advocating for them beyond your immediate team through written proposals and technical discussions.

Skills

Required

  • 8+ years of experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale
  • Extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems
  • Experience building or evolving shared backend platforms that support Rewards, Loyalty, Incentives, Experimentation, or other growth-critical workflows
  • Led complex technical initiatives requiring cross-team alignment, long-term architectural thinking, and influence without direct authority
  • Experience delivering major features, system components, or deprecating existing functionality through the definition and execution of a clear technical plan
  • Strong verbal and written communication skills

Nice to have

  • Python or Kotlin
  • AWS
  • MySQL
  • Spark
  • Kubernetes

What the JD emphasized

  • backend platforms that power incentives and growth initiatives
  • incentive systems
  • incentive-based experiences
  • business-critical incentive and growth systems
  • backend systems at scale
  • highly available distributed systems
  • shared backend platforms that support Rewards, Loyalty, Incentives, Experimentation, or other growth-critical workflows